Unofficial news and tips about Google

March 31, 2007

Google Writer

Google launched in October 2005 a feed reader, which became popular a year later. The company also offered publishing tools like Blogger, Page Creator and Google Docs, but even if they make your job easier by letting you focus on the content, you still have to come up with the text and the ideas.

Google Writer is a new application planned to be launched soon at Google Labs. It will integrate with many other Google services and guide you while writing a blog post, an essay or a news article.

Let's say you have a blog about Google, you wake up in the morning and wonder what to write. Now you can go to Google Writer, create a new project, enter some keywords and a small description and choose the default output (Blogger). Now when you create a new article inside this project, Google Writer gives you suggestions about the hot topics of the day, insightful articles about Google, news and popular queries that include "Google".

After choosing the topic, Google Writer suggests a title, some key quotes from other blogs and some interesting sites, images, and videos about the topic to facilitate your research. You can choose those that interests you and let Google Writer create some context around the quotes. Google Writer has a big database of n-grams from web pages and it's able to create grammatically-correct sentences. It also learns your writing style from the previous articles, it knows your favorite authors, sites and your interests.

Now that you have the basis of the article, Google Writer suggests some concepts or portions of the text you should write about or expand. Google Writer has a smart autocomplete that learns from the web and is adapted to your style. It's also able to summarize text, to show interesting content from the web related to a text fragment and previous articles on the same topic.

At launch, the tool will only support Internet Explorer and Firefox, and will be invitation-only. Google intends to expand the tool for other online activities like sending mail, instant messaging, so you can dedicate more time to other important things, like writing cool applications. I asked Google if the creativity will disappear with tools like this that build a text on top of some aggregated fragments, but I only got a strange mail: